Video: Nanoengineered electron guns

Jun 20, 2014

In this video we see an electron gun made of many thousands of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, each more than 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Dr Matt Cole, from the University of Cambridge, explains the technological importance of exploiting emerging nanomaterials to engineer functionally novel X-ray sources.

"Thanks to recent progress in nanomaterials growth we can now engineer materials at the scale of individual atoms.

This image, taken with an electron microscope, shows a nanoengineered electron gun formed from many carbon nanotubes that have been grown to be vertically aligned.

Electron guns are central to almost all commercial X-ray sources. They may be found in border control, food and pharmaceuticals inspection, electronics validation and medical diagnostics. Despite being so widespread, most systems use emitters that are inefficient because they have to be run at high temperatures.

Patterned by a process called high resolution electron beam lithography, carbon nanotubes are made of rolled and concentrically nested graphite; where each tube is over one thousand times smaller than a human hair.

This video is not supported by your browser at this time.

Nanoengineered electron gun. Credit: Matt Cole

More than a century old, bombardment-based X-ray sources have experienced little technological development. The use of one and two-dimensional nanomaterials - such as nanotubes, nanowires and single-atom thick graphene-like materials - have the potential to modernise this stagnated technology by producing longer lasting, increasingly stable emitters. In the future, these advanced emitters will facilitate the emergence of a host of new X-ray technologies such as micro-cancer treatment, high-throughput roll-to-roll manufacturing, and real-time three-dimensional imaging."

Related Stories

By combining the powers of two single-atom-thick carbon structures, researchers at the George Washington University's Micro-propulsion and Nanotechnology Laboratory have created a new ultracapacitor that ...

Imperfections in the regular atomic arrangements in crystals determine many of the properties of a material, and their diffusion is behind many microstructural changes in solids. However, imaging non-repeating ...

(Phys.org) —A new Oxford spin-out firm is targeting the difficult challenge of manufacturing fullerenes, known as 'bucky-balls' because of their spherical shape, a type of carbon nanomaterial which, like ...

Researchers at the NanoScience Center of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and at Harvard University, have discovered a novel way to make nanomaterials. Using computer simulations, the researchers have been ...

Recommended for you

Scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich (Switzerland) have created 3D images of tiny objects showing details down to 25 nanometres. In addition to the shape, the scientists determined how ...

Scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Institutes of Health have devised and demonstrated a new, shape-shifting probe, about one-hundredth as wide as a human ...

Researchers have developed a novel technique for crafting nanometer-scale necklaces based on tiny star-like structures threaded onto a polymeric backbone. The technique could provide a new way to produce ...

There's more to quantum tunneling than meets the eye – or rather, the visualization technique. (Quantum tunneling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon where a particle transitions through a classically-forbidden ...

The breakthrough findings, reported in the journal Nature, allow better understanding of the counterintuitive behaviour of water at the molecular scale and are important for development of more efficient techno ...

User comments : 0

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.